Reptile (2023 | USA | 123 minutes | Grant Singer)

It’s finally happened. Justin Timberlake has aged into playing roles like a middle-aged mama’s boy real estate agent, gradually taking the reins from a company that his parents built. Time comes for us all, though it’s less kind to his girlfriend who gets viciously murdered while preparing to show one of the nice, but fading, large houses in their portfolio.

Her death widens the lens, primarily to include the close knit local law enforcement community. There, Benicio Del Toro is a once big city detective living out his second act in Scarborough after some hazy controversy. Alicia Silverstone is his still head-turning crime-obsessed wife whose uncle (Eric Bogosian) gave him another shot. A cast of That Guy character actors, familiar from other police dramas like the Wire and Law and Order fill out the boys club responsible for solving the case.

In his feature film directing debut, Grant Singer leverages his experience with music videos to find interesting angles and create a foreboding mood while still matching the cinematography to the flat washed-out suburban setting. Small town grudges abound as the Del Toro’s dogged detective starts pulling on the threads connecting the case. Creepy locals loom everywhere, secrets abound, everyone seemingly has something to hide or a grudge to settle. Honestly, there are probably a dozen too many plot twists in what becomes a labyrinthine procedural, but there’s enough grimy fun to be had until it all becomes too exhausting.

Woman of the Hour (2023 | USA, Canada | 94 minutes | Anna Kendrick)

Anna Kendrick makes her directing debut with the true story of the prodigious serial killer Rodney Alcala. It’s an audacious true crime story of a man who sexually assaulted and murdered an untold number of women throughout the 1970s. But this menacing real-life murder’s tale is made all the more bizarre by the fact that he also appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game in the midst of his killing spree.

Kendrick’s way into this grimly bizarre tale is in casting herself as Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling actress whose path unexpectedly crossed with the killer by way of television show. When we meet her, she’s a Yale-trained thespian whose academic-background and constantly-in-her-own-head intelligence have gotten the better of her in the shallow city of angels. Frustrated by a series of failed auditions, she takes an agent up on an offer to appear on the hit game show as love-hungry bachelorette solely an opportunity to be seen by a wide television audience.

The impulse to center the film around the incredible fact of a vicious killer appearing on television in the midst of a killing spree is understandable, but it induces a lot of unforced errors. The timeline of Alcala’s crimes is necessarily disorienting and scattered as it cuts between Kendrick’s character’s time on the show and a string of predatory murders throughout the decade. Across the film Daniel Zovatto plays Alcala with unsettling menace as he darkly charms vulnerable victims into posing for photographs or inviting him into their homes. The audience knows these women are in trouble long before the victims do, and Kendrick infuses these predatory scenes with suitably unsettling menace.

Kendrick’s scenes on the show in which Bradshaw’s irresistible intelligence takes the silly proceedings by the horns and in a short sequence after the taping with Alcala are among the film’s most compelling. Still, there’s a sort of contradictory hollowness given that she is perhaps the least essential player in the grim true story. While she makes an admirable effort to give some life to the other victims and the ways in which the real concerns of women are ignored, it’s hard for the audience to be pulled away and scattered across time when the scenes with Kendrick and Zovatto are clearly the most compelling presences in the screen, despite being only an odd, but obviously fascinating, footnote on this story.

Still, as a debut effort it packs in some truly eerie moments, crackling dialog, and a fascinating perspective on violence and survival.

The Dead Don’t Hurt (2023 | Canada, Mexico, Denmark | 129 minutes | Viggo Mortensen)

Vicky Krieps brings indomitable spirit to a cipher pioneer woman in Viggo Mortensen’s meandering and mournful memory piece of whisper thin western archetypes. They play very different souls who meet in 1860s San Francisco in a street market when they bond over a love of preserved fish wrapped in newspapers.

In typical Western fashion, neither are particularly effusive about their backgrounds, but they somehow forge a strong enough connection that she’s willing to ditch her big city life with an art-loving rich guy and ride off on horseback with affable Viggo to his isolated shanty a few days after figuring out each other’s wonky accents. (French-Canadian and Danish, respectively, sort of.) There, in the Nevada desert she continues her love of gardening and takes up a job behind the bar in the town’s rough and tumble saloon. He, for reasons unknown, trots off to the Civil War for years, leaving her to her fierce independence and the tribulations of a woman alone on the frontier.

In the opening minutes, we see her quiet death as well as a violent shootout in the film opens with her death as well as a violent shootout in the town, leaving the rest of the film to unspool the backstory and aftermath at a lugubrious pace. Mortensen makes the most of the scenic setting but doesn’t really give himself enough to do character-wise, Krieps of course enlivens every scene that she’s in with the sort of energy that has allowed better films (like Phantom Thread or even Corsage to soar). Amid the classical western rhythms, there are some sparks of dark violence, dry humor, and yearning to latch onto, but just not enough to keep me alert after a cross-country red eye flight and several films into a long day.